Che Guevara–
Viva! Hasta la Victoria Siempre!
By Peter
Koenig
October 13,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
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Che! – You are
one of the greatest revolutionaries of the 20th Century.
You inspired tens of millions of people throughout
the world to fight for justice, for their freedom
and civil rights. You have left a vision of hope, of
never giving up – a legacy of solidarity and of Venceremos!
– we shall overcome. You have been murdered by the
most criminal organization of the most evil empire,
the CIA of the United States of America – but your
spirit lives on in Latin America, Africa, Asia and
even in vassal Europe, inspiring generation after
generation for class struggle, that there is
universal justice that must be fought for and will
be won. Che – you are a true Hero – an icon for the
poor and powerless!
Ernesto “Che” Guevara
was born in Rosario, Argentina, on 14 June 1928 and
was assassinated in Higuera, Bolivia, by CIA-led
Bolivian forces on 9 October 1967. It was a summary
execution – no trial, no questions asked – 50 years
ago. What has changed in 5 decades? – At the
surface, one might say – not much. The world is
still divided between the capitalist, neocolonialist
west and the much more visionary and peaceful east.
However,
moral consciousness is rising everywhere. There is
slow progression; the vessel is slowly veering
towards a more peaceful multi-polar world. Not just
the ascent of Russia and China are bringing a new
wind of consciousness to millions of people, but the
sensation of change is noticeable everywhere – from
South to North and from East to West. It is still
brittle and weak – but it is growing and gaining
strength. And Che – his unquestioned determination
to fight for a better world – was instrumental in
this awakening.
Che left
Argentina in the early 1950s as a medical student,
accompanied by his pal,
Alberto Granado,
a young doctor, on a single-cylinder sputtering 1939
Norton motor cycle – they called it “La Poderosa”
(“the Mighty”), exploring the Latin American
Subcontinent which they knew only from books.
Granado was probably the first one to give Ernesto
the famous nickname “Che” – an Argentinian
equivalent to ‘buddy’ or ‘pal’. They travelled
through South America and discovered misery, poverty
and disease. Combining Che’s “The Motor Cycle
Diaries” and Granado’s “With Che Through
Latin America”, Robert Redford turned the
diaries in 2004 into an epic movie that has since
become as symbolic for young revolutionary rebellion
as has Alberto
Korda’s famous photography of Che’s.
The film portrays the two friends
exposed to utmost destitution throughout South
America, turning Che gradually into the
revolutionary, who eventually was instrumental in
freeing Cuba, at the side of Fidel and Raul Castro,
from the deadly oppression of US-supported
dictator, Fulgencio
Batista.
During
their trip, the two friends served as doctors in San
Pablo, an isolated leprosy colony near Iquitos, in
Peru’s Amazon region. They went their separate ways
at the end of their trip in 1953 in Venezuela.
Granado stayed on in Venezuela, where he felt his raison
d’être was to be a medical doctor, working as a
leprosy specialist in a Venezuelan hospital. It took
8 years until they met again in Havana, when Che,
who by then was second-in-command to Fidel, invited
Alberto Granado to Cuba, where he was to teach
biology at Havana University and in 1962 created the
Faculty of Medicine at the University of Santiago in
Cuba.
As a medical
doctor, Che saw often hopelessness and misery. When
he treated once a woman dying from tuberculosis, he
was horrified by the public health system:
“How long
this present order, based on the absurd idea of
caste, will last is not within my means to
answer, but it’s time that those who govern
spent less time publicizing their own virtues
and more money, much more money, funding
socially useful works.”
And he
continued,
“It is
at times like this, when a doctor is conscious
of his complete powerlessness, that he longs for
change: a change to prevent the injustice of a
system in which only a month ago this poor woman
was still earning her living as a waitress,
wheezing and panting but facing life with
dignity. In circumstances like this, individuals
in poor families who can’t pay their way become
surrounded by an atmosphere of barely disguised
acrimony; they stop being father, mother, sister
or brother and become a purely negative factor
in the struggle for life and, consequently, a
source of bitterness for the healthy members of
the community who resent their illness as if it
were a personal insult to those who have to
support them.”
Ernesto Che
Guevara moved on from Venezuela on a cargo boat to
Miami and from there through Central America to
Mexico. He later learned about Guatemala’s President
Arbenz’s assassination by a CIA-led coup d’état in
1954 on behalf of United Fruit – which Arbenz wanted
to nationalize. Che became increasingly a
revolutionary, whose goal it was to fight for
justice and equality, for a better world and to free
oppressed people throughout the globe from nefarious
capitalism – starting with Latin America.
In
Mexico, Che
met with Fidel and Raul Castro. Together with a
small revolutionary armada, they sailed on the now
famed yacht Granma, participating in the historic 26th of
July 1953 Movement (M-26-7) against the
Moncada army Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. The
assault failed. Che was injured, Castro was captured
and sentenced to 15 years in prison but freed after
two years in an armistice. They then returned to
Mexico, where they organized and planned another,
better prepared attack on the Batista regime.
In 1955,
together with others by now renowned Cuban
revolutionaries, like Camilo Cienfuegos and Juan
Almeida Bosque, Fidel, Raul and Che formed a
disciplined 82 men-strong guerilla force, aiming at
overthrowing Batista. They left Veracruz, Mexico in
late November 1956 and targeted the small town of
Niquero, Oriente Province of Cuba. However, they
were discovered by Cuban air force helicopters and
had to land on 2 December 1956 on a beach called Los
Colorados, about 25 km south of the designated spot
where Celia Sánchez,
a comrade revolutionary in Cuba, waited for them
with jeeps, petrol, weapons and food. Due to the
emergency landing, they could not benefit from this
essential guerilla war materiel.
They fought
hard against Batista’s troops and lost 70 of the 82
men that sailed aboard Granma. But they did not give
up. They regrouped in the Sierra Maestra mountains,
where they attracted hundreds of young Cuban
volunteers. They won many battles against Batista’s
army. These battles became the Cuban Revolution and
eventually ended on New Year’s Eve of 1958, when
they marched victoriously into Havana. In January
1959 Batista fled to the Dominican Republic.
Following the
triumphant Cuban Revolution, Che Guevara gained
prominence and was soon promoted to second-in-charge
to Fidel. He occupied several key roles in the new
government, like instituting the agrarian land
reform, leading a successful countrywide literacy
campaign; he was Minister of Industry, Director of
Cuba’s Central Bank, instructed Cuba’s armed forces.
As such, he also trained
the militia forces who repelled the Bay of Pigs
Invasion and was instrumental in bringing the Soviet
nuclear missiles to Cuba which prompted the
1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Che also toured the
world as Cuba’s chief diplomat, representing Cuba’s
socialism at the United Nations in both New York and
Geneva, as well as everywhere he traveled.
In 1965,
Che decided to leave Cuba. His major contribution to
the Cuban Revolution, though ongoing to this day –
was done. He was heavily influenced by
Marxism-Leninism and saw the so-called Third World’s
underdevelopment – poverty, destitution, disease –
as a dependence on the abusive exploitation by the
west – that which, in turn, is the inherent result
of imperialism and monopoly capitalism. The only
remedy to fight it was socialist internationalism, a
world revolution.
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Che left
Cuba for Congo-Kinshasa, now Zaïre, where he was
unsuccessful in fomenting a revolution against
Joseph Mobutu, one of the most corrupt and murderous
dictators Africa has known until this day. Che
Guevara was particularly inspired to help the people
of then Congo (a former Belgian colony, today
neocolony), because his comrade
Patrice Lumumba,
the first democratically elected President of the
Congo in 1960, was overturned in a coup d’état by
Colonel Mobutu, helped by Belgian forces. Mobutu
ordered Lumumba’s murder by firing squad in January
1961.
After a second
coup, the brutal authoritarian Mobutu assumed power
in 1965. With the help of the neocolonial US and the
UK, he stayed in power more than three decades,
until 1997, putting the extraordinary riches of
minerals and petrol basically at western disposal
(against a hefty fee, of course, for his own (Swiss)
bank accounts, not for his country), to the
detriment of the Congolese people. Che Guevara was
powerless against these boundless and ruthless
military forces – forces that continue to protect
also the Kabila dynasty that followed Mobutu in
1997, first by Laurent Kabila, and after his
assassination in 2001, by his son Joseph – who to
this day is ruling mineral-rich Zaïre, while
sustaining bloody civil war-like conditions that has
killed millions of people, including women and
children, all for the benefit of western – mostly US
– mineral giants feeding mainly the US military
industrial complex.
Back to Che.
After his unfortunate experience at revolution in
Africa, he went back to his roots – Latin America, a
culture which he was familiar with and where he
believed a true and lasting revolution was possible
– to bring dignity and sovereignty back to the
peoples who were miserably oppressed by Washington
backed military regimes for decades. On November 4,
1966, Che crossed the border into Bolivia under
false identity. He thought Bolivia, the center of
South America, was ideal to start and spread a
revolution throughout Latin America.
Che formed a
small army of 47 fighters from Bolivia, Cuba, Peru
and Argentina, the ‘Ejército de Liberación
Nacional de Bolivia’ – ELN (The Bolivian
National Liberation Army). Che and his people fought
on several occasions the army of the cruel military
dictator, René Barrientos, (1964-1969), who came to
power in 1964 by a coup helped – by whom else –
Washington. Che and his troops had also a
non-fighting network that kept them informed and
supplied them with food and water as their hardship
and information inaccessibility made them vulnerable
in the jungle of Bolivia.
Two members of
Che’s support team, Regis Debray (French) and Ciro
Bustos (Argentinian), were captured and tortured. It
is said, but has been often contested, that they
revealed Che’s whereabouts, which allowed Barrientos’
army to intensify its battle and eventually by the
end of September 1967 have a clear advantage over
Che’s guerilla army. Che and his men fought their
last battle on 8 October in the Churro gorge, when
they were captured and taken to an area called La
Higuera, in the Department of Santa Cruz in Bolivia.
Che was executed on 9 October and his body hidden by
the military, though his diary made the way into
Fidel’s hands. Fidel eventually published it.
In 1995,
Fidel Castro
initiated with the
President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozado, also
called Goni the “Gringo”, a search for Che’s
remains. They were found in Vallegrande near La
Higuera and sent to Cuba, where they were laid to
rest in Santa Clara in a Mausoleum especially built
for Che.
On 17 October
1997 CNN reports “Cuba paid tribute to revolutionary
hero Ernest “Che” Guevara … with a pomp-filled state
burial and a ringing tribute from Fidel Castro, the
man he helped propel to power nearly four decades
ago. He said:
“His
inerasable mark is now in history, and his
luminous gaze of a prophet has become a symbol
for all the poor of this world.””
Fidel’s words
still keep ringing through the ether of the
universe. Undoubtedly, Che, Fidel and Hugo Chavez
were among the most influential revolutionaries of
the Western Hemisphere in the 20th Century.
Their legacy keeps emitting signals of peace and
justice throughout the world.
Peter Koenig
is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also
a former World Bank staff and worked extensively
around the world in the fields of environment and
water resources. He lectures at universities in the
US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly
for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik, PressTV, The
4th Media (China), TeleSUR, The Vineyard of The
Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the
author of Implosion
– An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental
Destruction and Corporate Greed –
fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank
experience around the globe. He is also a co-author
of The
World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the
Resistance.
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